


Feathers falling

by AetosForeas



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 11:02:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20134387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AetosForeas/pseuds/AetosForeas
Summary: It's 399 BC and Kassandra has returned to Kephallonia to bury her oldest friend





	Feathers falling

In the second year of the 95th Olympiad, she buried her oldest friend.

She held the funeral on Kephallonia. At the hovel she’d once called home, now deserted. The plague had stripped the island down to a mere handful and those that survived eventually fled. Sami was slowly being repopulated, but it would be a while before anyone wanted to live in a dilapidated, glorified hut on the edge of a cliff.

She stroked his feathers one last time. He was old, for an eagle, and yet she’d somehow hoped that the staff would transfer its cost to them both – that there would never have to be a day where she did not bear his talons on her arm. He’d been willing enough, that much she knew. His body simply failed him. She kissed his beak, let herself shed tears as she only had twice before and then dug a hole using her hands. It took time, but she had that, didn’t she?

When it was done she laid him down along with all of his feathers that she’d collected over the years, and a small copper charm, almost a coin but oval with an eagle wings spread in flight.

“I doubt you can hear me, Phoibe.” She knelt over the hole, her eyes hot and her head heavy. “But if you can, please take care of him for me. I know you always wanted an eagle – he’ll be your eagle now. He was always the best I could have asked for. He’ll do you proud.”

She pushed the dirt over the hole without being able to see it. When it was covered, she took a few moments kneeling before she stood up, speaking the old prayer to the Earth itself, that it would greet him. A child of the air, yes, but he’d been her family for so long, ever since that night on Taygetos, it felt like she imagined the loss of her arm might.

When she reached Sami, the sight of her ship made her gut lurch. The painted eagle devouring a snake on the sail, the shields borne by her crew. Some of them hadn’t even been alive when she met Barnabus, when she saved him from drowning in a pot. Now he was five years dead, and it was Leda, his daughter, who was _Triearchos_ of the Adrestia. And Leda had begun to go grey as well.

“How did it go?”

“It was fine.” Kassandra and Leda weren’t as close as the misthios had been with her father, but out of respect for the man she’d offered the job to Leda, and she’d proved her father’s daughter. Still, there was much the misthios didn’t feel she could confide to her. The way Leda looked at her – less like a trusted friend or valued colleague and more a demigod – was one she grew tired of. “Just a simple thing.”

“I know…” Leda stopped for a moment. “He was more of a man than most men I’ve known. I’ll miss him.”

Kassandra nodded because it was taking most of her will to keep from showing how much she felt his loss. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of it, as much as she was _tired_ of it – tired of watching them all age and die. Her last trip to Sparta, even her _mater_ looked older and frailer than she remembered, and even Alexios with his beard and his scowl had grey hairs. He’d married a woman in Arkadia, and his last letter sounded happy enough, for him. She had two nieces she hadn’t met yet.

_It’s not his fault. _She hated that she couldn’t even think about visiting her brother, seeing him with his wife and children, without imagining what Elpidios looked like now. He was a man now – did he look like Natakas? If she found him, would she recognize him? Did he have his father’s smile, his eyes, his ready laugh… or was he like her? It wasn’t Alexios’ fault that she would never know her son, had already lost the chance to see his first love, kiss his first skinned knee, teach him how to hold a spear.

_Staying away from Alexios keeps the Order away from him and his. It’s not jealousy. It’s a sacrifice._ She stepped up to the rail and tried to believe it.

“So.” She looked out over the water. “Is everyone aboard?”

“Six are still in Sami.”

“Send someone to fetch them. The sooner we’re away from here, the happier I’ll be.”

“As you say.” Leda nodded, headed away and then stopped. “Oh, I forgot. There’s a letter for you. From Athens, of all places.”

“Delivered _here_? Who would…” She took the scroll and looked at the seal. It was unfamiliar to her – a job offer? She’d taken to being very selective about work in the later years of the war, after Alcibiades and Thucydides both died on her. Not that she was willing to take jobs for Alcibiades – he’d proved a brilliant but erratic _Strategos_, and eventually someone had hated him enough to set his house on fire and riddle him with arrows. If he’d listened to her… but he hadn’t, and now he was gone. Lysander had beaten the Athenians, and then against all reason Sparta had spared her enemy.

Kassandra smiled, remembering the look on Agis’ face when she’d made her feelings on the matter known to him. No one wanted the granddaughter of Leonidas to remember she was an Agiad and make a claim, especially not over the boy everyone was pretending was Pausanias. Kassandra didn’t know if Pleistoanax had sired a second Pausanias, and she didn’t care. She knew that they all feared that she or Alexios would claim the Agiad throne and throw the nation into turmoil, and she’d used that. It was for Pericles and Herodotus and Alcibiades, a last little gesture. And of course for Sokrates, who still lived there.

She peeled the wax back with her thumbnail.

_To Kassandra, called the Bearer of the Eagle of Zeus_

_My name is Plato. I am one of the teacher Sokrates’ students, and I write this letter as he has instructed me to do, in honor and respect of his wishes. I would rather have written it to you sooner, but his wishes were clear. “I want no heroics, no last minute rescues, and I know Kassandra. She has shown herself to me through her deeds a hundred times.” And so I am forced to tell you that this day, as I write these words, Sokrates has died._

She stopped reading for a moment. Sokrates was an older man, easily seventy years. She hadn’t expected this, but neither was she shocked by it. She put her hand down on the rail, keenly aware that Ikaros was not there, that she could not scratch the feathers of his neck. After a moment she turned back to the scroll in her hand.

_The master, feeling that the accusations of impiety and corrupting the youth are absurdities, yet said he felt bound to respect them. He has taken up the cup of hemlock…_

Her fingers threatened to rip the parchment apart, but she managed to master herself and keep reading.

…_and as I write this, he has passed beyond the Styx. “All of philosophy is training for death,” as he says to me. He asked that I write these letters, and send them to several locales he knows you frequent, that you might be acquainted of his wishes. “I have known you – you, out of all those I have known, never once hesitated to show yourself to me fully, through words and actions. Take no action, Kassandra. I have lived as an Athenian, and now, at last, I die as an Athenian. I am proud to have called you my friend.”_

There was more, but she could barely see it. Her eyes wavered. For a wild moment she thought about taking the Adrestia south, of sailing into Laconia. Lysander and Agesiliaus would either give her an army or she would _take_ one, and the throne in the bargain – she imagined it, an Agiad Queen leading the Spartans north to crush Athens once and for all for this. For killing one of her last friends, after she worked so hard to spare them the consequences of their stupid, vain little war.

_There will be no thrones for you_, the voice of Aletheia. She hadn’t spoken in years, but Kassandra could not forget their last encounter, the travel through the underworld… had it been a dream? Had Atlantis been real, had she been there, or… these were questions Kassandra still had no answer for, years later. But she knew the voice was right. She would not sit on the Agiad throne, she would not lead an army to Athens. Sokrates had asked her not to, and it was the last thing she could do for him. Her last gift to him.

_I am proud to have called you my friend_.

“You irritating little… I could accept this from Alcibiades, he always had some ridiculous scheme, some wild demand. But from you, I expected less heartache, Sokrates.” She rolled the scroll back up. “Because you buried Phoibe for me, I’ll do this for you. This one last time.”

When Leda returned to the ship, the last stragglers in tow, she found Kassandra staring up at the sail.

“Was it a job?”

“What?”

“The letter. I assumed one of your contacts had a task they wanted performed.”

“The war’s over.” Kassandra shook her head. “All the mercenaries are in Persia now. Perhaps…” She straightened. “For now, we head south. To Megaris. I have to pay my respects to an old friend.”


End file.
